


When the cicadas sing

by 62miles



Series: I saw the sky painted in your eyes [1]
Category: SHINee
Genre: Alternate Universe, Coming of Age, M/M, Wartime
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-22
Updated: 2016-01-22
Packaged: 2018-05-15 13:43:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,535
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5787415
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/62miles/pseuds/62miles
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He is seventeen, and only some things matter.</p><p>His self-assembled static-filled radio. The ever-shifting map of the frontlines sketched on the back of an old calendar page. Dreams of the trenches and the tanks, bayonets and grenades, living out the stories of heroes written between the covers of their language class textbook.</p><p>And that boy.</p>
            </blockquote>





	When the cicadas sing

**Author's Note:**

> Written in 2013. This universe of mine is much older, filled with many people and many stories. This merely begins one of them.

  
  
  
  
  
_That year, he was seventeen._  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
His seat is right next to the window, in the second last row.  
  
The mint-colored wall has a long shallow groove along where the edge of the desk meets it, gray from the wood rubbing the paint away day after day. The desk itself is an old scarred thing. Two of its legs are shorter than the others and someone had chipped and stripped a whole piece off its upper right corner, torn away like poplar bark. Notches line its rim, counting out bored hours, repetitive days. (Most are dark and waxy to the touch; some are cruder, fresher.) And its face is full of wounds: layers of lines and doodles, names and confessions.  
  
Different sets of handwriting, some carved into the grains, others traced out in pencil and in ink, blacks and blues.  
  
  
  
  
 _1 + 1 = 2_  
  
  
 _Hello hoobae I used to sit here_  
  
  
 _Jang Deokwoo was here!_  
  
  
 _正正正丅_  
  
  
 _Old lady Park is such a bitch_  
  
  
 _Fuck_  
  
  
 _Class 3-1's Shin Risook is really pretty_  
  
  
 _If bald-man-Yoon asks the answer is B_  
  
  
 _No the answer is 12.7 stupid_  
  
  
 _L = (r - r 0) x p_  
  
  
 _I want to be a Lieutenant_  
  
  
  
  
He'd complained about getting assigned to this desk when they drew lots at the beginning of the semester. Not because it's all the way in the back and he's too short to see over Choi Jinseok's head. (He doesn't have much interest in whatever the teachers are teaching anyway.) Not because his table is lopsided. (A couple of stolen chalkboard erasers fixed it right up.) Not because it has been vandalized to the point of being a piece of art. (He's adding to it, one pen stroke at a time: _Say, why is it that time always runs a little faster than we can / We're chasing after the horizon but the sun is setting ag_ —)  
  
No, he'd complained because the last window in the classroom is the only one that is rusted shut.  
  
  
  
The insect song slips in from the windows ahead of his, quick sharp beats weaving through the background droning, crescendos and decrescendos. But the swells of hot air that flips at the pages of class secretary An Nayeon's math textbook hardly reaches back to where he is.  
  
  
 _Tap. Ta-tap. Tap._ His fingertips bounce against the messy scrawl in his notebook, partway between Morse code—every boy in the school is at least half an amateur radio operator—and the lurching melody that he's humming under his breath. The barely legible numbers smudge over the off-white paper.  
  
 _Tap tap tap_ , on the blackboard, the chalk marks out an equation he doesn't recognize.  
  
  
He squints his left eye against the sun that has swung out from behind the building across the courtyard. It stings like the naked bulb in the living room back home when his sister lets him twist it on all the way to do homework at night. Except the sun is brighter. And it scalds his cheek.  
  
When he lifts his hand to shield his face, he suddenly feels everything more acutely than before—the stickiness that's gluing his fingers together, the sweat that collects by his hairline and rolls down between his shoulder blades. Tugging the fabric of his shirt away from his skin, he slouches down in his seat and tilts back so that he can balance his head on the empty desk behind him.  
  
The height is perfect for him to see the top row of pastel yellow lockers lining the classroom's back wall, though perhaps pastel yellow isn't the right way to describe them, not ever since they've been plastered with the citizens campaign posters. ("Remind Your Neighbors: Save Water, Save Food, Save Fuel." "Do A Good Deed: Bring Your Scrap Metals To The Community Recycling Center!" "Are You A Responsible Citizen? Use Your Ration Card." "Help Sew Uniforms For The Front-line Troops!")  
  
Being able to see the lockers also means he's able to see the large war slogan painted on the wall above them. The precise lettering is a vivid youthful red, louder than the cicadas, and he knows what it says by heart, even better than the school motto that used to occupy that space.  
  
Every time he catches sight of those words, he repeats them inside his head. In his own voice. In the voice of the announcer who hosts the morning and evening segments on the government's public radio station. In the voice of the principal after the flag-raising and before their daily exercises in the courtyard. In the voices of his peers, echoing it back to the adults at the top of their lungs.  
  
And it sets his insides afire. He can feel his chest rise and his spine straighten and his heart pick up pace as if he—  
  
  
  
  
"—im Jonghyun!"  
  
"Yes!"  
  
He leaps to his feet, nearly knocking his chair over and kicking a chalkboard eraser out from under one leg of his desk. In a panic to save the thing from tilting, he ends up making it worse. His rolling pencil slips through his grasp and his notebook flips onto the floor. His pencil case teeters, then follows suit. _Crash_ , and it spills its contents everywhere, including the spare change that he's been collecting behind his mother and sister's backs. Forty-one pairs of eyes fly toward him, including those of a scrawny bespectacled boy named Shim Jonghyun who is also on his feet and about to give his ans—oh. _Oh._  
  
Out of habit, he runs a hand over the back of his head. The short hairs of his buzzcut prickle against his palm.  
  
"Sorry, Miss Kang. I-I, er—I saw an airplane."  
  
Everyone's eyes widen further because they're neither a major city nor near the war zone and seeing an airplane without being notified of a friendly flyover or a drill these days means—  
  
" _No!_ No no no, I—I mean I _thought_ I saw one! Not that I saw one." He hurriedly waves his hands in denial and corrects himself. "It-it was a bird! Just a bird...haha... I didn't see it clearly, you know, the sun—" he points out the window "—the sun was in my eye and all, so......"  
  
He wipes his moist fingers over his shorts, just as wide-eyed as their startled young teacher.  
  
Miss Kang's knuckles are bloodless as she clutches her meter stick like a weapon, but eventually she blinks and then sets the thing down on her desk. Slowly, she wipes her chalky fingers over her forehead, smoothing back the wiry black hair that she has braided into two stubby pigtails. She offers the class a watery smile and nods before turning to the board and trying to make sense of the problem she'd just written out.  
  
Off the hook, he collapses into his chair. His seatmate snickers at the exaggerated sigh of relief that he breathes out.  
  
But by the time he bends over and grabs his notebook off the floor, he notices that all his coins are gone. Straightening up, he scans the boys sitting around him with narrowed eyes but everyone only offers him a view of the backs of their heads. Damn it, and he'd been just forty-nine cents short of the six fifty he needs to buy that pack of oil pastels too!  
  
He buries his face into the yellowing pages of his textbook and picks at the strip of rice glue that an older student had used to patch up a tear.  
  
  
  
He hates math class.  
  
Actually, he hates school.  
  
  
  
What's the use? He knows where he'll end up in less than a year when he graduates: slaving away from dawn to dusk in a factory till his hands and feet and shoulders are thick with calluses and his joints ache and his muscles stiffen and his eyesight goes bad.  
  
The government consolidated the six years of junior high and high school into four when they were two years and eleven months into the war, but even then he doesn't get why the adults insist that they rot away for so long. Let the smart kids suffer their way through the books, kids like class president Seo Mijin, who's a squad captain in the Youth Alliance and wears a sunflower yellow armband to show for it (unlike the rest of them who, at best, have only earned their membership scarves and maybe a star of excellence or two). Rumor has it the principal will recommend her for the medical training program run in the big cities.  
  
  
So instead of paying attention to the _xyz_ s and the _123_ s and the operators that punctuate them, he lets his mind wander. He dozes off, listening to the cicadas sing in the afternoon heat and thinking of the boy who lives on the outskirts of town, in the leaky shack behind that abandoned cowshed by the willow trees.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
He is seventeen, and only some things matter.  
  
  
His self-assembled static-filled radio. The ever-shifting map of the frontlines sketched on the back of an old calendar page. Dreams of the trenches and the tanks, bayonets and grenades, living out the stories of heroes written between the covers of their language class textbook.  
  
  
  
  
And that boy.  
  
  
  
  


 


End file.
